Jericho III Missile
Jericho III MissileIsrael Aerospace Industries

An Israeli military attack on Iran would ignite a regional war, former IDF Operations Commander Yisrael Ziv told Army Radio Sunday.

Reiterating other officials' observations that an attack cannot be compared with the aerial strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, Ziv said, “We are talking about a number of operations and not just one.”

He also warned that a flood of statements from the offices of the Prime Minister and the Defense Ministry signal a “worrisome lack of security” in the government.

Knesset Member Tzachi HaNegbi issued a public plea to politicians on Sunday to keep quiet on Iran, but pundits both in Israel and elsewhere continue to make predictions and develop analyses in the wake of the latest reports that Iran is rapidly approaching its goal of developing a nuclear warhead that can be placed on a missile aimed at Israel.

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The Atlantic on Sunday, echoed Ziv’s warnings. “A strike could trigger an overt war without end… and an all-out missile war may escalate into something especially horrific, so in essence, Israel would be trading a theoretical war later for an actual war now,” he wrote.

Goldberg listed six other reasons against an Israeli military attack, ranging from the risk of the deaths of innocent people, both Iranian and Israeli, to a possible “disaster for the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

The recent escalation in warnings that Iran is rapidly approaching its unstated goal of developing a nuclear warhead, that presumably would be pointed at Israel, has been followed with analyses and predictions that cover every possibility of whether Iran nuclear capability is imminent or in the distant future.